Professor Inge Daniels
Professor of Anthropology
Fellow of St Cross College
My research is situated at the intersection of Economic, Visual, and Material Anthropology. Based on more than twenty-five years of fieldwork experience both in Japan and in the UK, it explores the ways material objects, spaces, and practices shape human experiences, identities, and relationships. Specifically, I engage with three major fields: the anthropology of housing and infrastructure, the study of material culture and economies of luck, and applied visual anthropology through experimental exhibition design, photography and film. By bridging empirical research with public engagement, my work challenges conventional disciplinary boundaries and expands anthropology’s scope and societal relevance.
Awards
Oxford University Teaching Excellence Award 2014-2015
ICAS Book Prize 2013 Reading Committee Accolades / Social Sciences for The Japanese House
Oxford University Teaching Excellence Award 2007-2008
Contact
Email: inge.daniels@anthro.ox.ac.uk
Telephone: +44 (0)1865 274677
1.Anthropology of Housing: Atmosphere and Infrastructure
Since January 2020, I have served as Principal Investigator (PI) for Disobedient Buildings, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) until June 2025. This project examines the connections between housing, welfare, and wellbeing in the United Kingdom, Romania, and Norway, responding to the global rise in incidents in aging high-rise infrastructure such as the Grenfell Tower fire in London in 2017. Disobedient Buildings investigates how residents of European tower blocks create safe, comfortable homes amid infrastructural challenges. It combines anthropological research on atmospheres—a concept I have long researched—with the Anthropology of Infrastructure, while challenging the usual focus on technology-driven public projects emblematic of progress.
By focusing on housing, I aim to uncover the complex relationship between macro-level policies and everyday experiences that shape people’s well-being, health, and welfare within the home. Rather than seeing infrastructure as neutral or monolithic, my approach contextualizes it as a culturally embedded and affective space where inhabitants shape, and are shaped by, their environment. My previous monograph, The Japanese House: Material Culture in the Modern Home (Daniels 2010), based on one year of immersive fieldwork within Japanese households, significantly informs this research. This book remains a foundational text in the Anthropology of the Home exploring often neglected mundane domestic practices such as storage, bathing, and cleaning, and their roles in the seasonal, relational, and affective rhythms of daily life. I emphasize the sensory and embodied aspects of home, living alongside Japanese families, and study “what it feels like” to inhabit their intimate domestic spaces.
2.Material Culture and Economies of Luck
This research, initiated during my PhD at University College London, examines how everyday, mass-produced objects shape social, spiritual, and economic relationships in Japan. My overarching aim is to challenge the assumption that material and ritual life are separate, showing how they reinforce luck, care, and relational networks in uncertain times.
The first strand focuses on Japanese gift exchange. In an influential Journal of Material Culture paper (Daniels 2009b), I argue that, beyond symbolic and social value, gifts’ material qualities matter. Japanese recipients prefer ephemeral goods that create sociality while being shared. In a 2023 book chapter, I reflect on my own experiences of Japanese gifting and its broader anthropological implications (Daniels 2023). The second strand explores material aspects of Japanese spirituality. This can be traced back to an influential 2003 article on Japanese lucky objects in the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (Daniels 2003). This body of work highlights the role of non-human entities, such as spirits, in sustaining social life. In Dolls are Scary (Daniels 2009b), a chapter in Material Religion, edited by David Morgan, I examine Japanese people’s relationships with dolls in their homes, questioning the Euro-American concept of religion as ‘inner faith’. I also explore how Japan’s commercial market sustains sacred economies. Contrary to the view that commercialisation weakens traditions, I argue that market practices and seasonal rituals are intertwined, as shown in my 2009 chapter in Time, Consumption and Everyday Life (Daniels 2009a). My 2012 article on Economies of Fortune returns to many of these themes, exploring the pivotal role Japanese married women play in caring for a multitude of human and non-human actors in order to protect their families and their homes against all kinds of calamities (Daniels 2012).
I further expand on the Economies of Luck theme in a 2024 Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute article (Daniels 2024) on Japan’s New Year’s card tradition, an annual ritual circulating roughly 3 billion cards. Despite digitalisation, these paper objects sustain economic, social, and spiritual networks. I am also developing an ethnographic film on this practice as both a research outcome and a public engagement tool.
3.Public Anthropology and Experimentation with Exhibitions, Photography and Film
Public anthropology, through exhibitions, photography, and film, forms the third area of my research. My work aims to make anthropological insights accessible to non-specialist audiences, using participatory practices that encourage interaction. In 2001, I curated Souvenirs in Contemporary Japan at the British Museum, accompanying my PhD dissertation at UCL (Daniels 2001). This exhibition encouraged visitors to interact with exhibits and explore Japanese souvenir culture in multi-sensory ways. It shaped my approach to exhibitions as collaborative spaces where visitors actively engage with anthropological research. In 2011, I curated At Home in Japan: Beyond the Minimal House at the Museum of the Home, East London. This immersive exhibition recreated a Japanese apartment, allowing visitors to interact with everyday objects. Inspired by my 2003 fieldwork inside Japanese homes, it challenged exoticised views of Japan, emphasising lived experience over stereotypical minimalism. The widely attended exhibition became an impact case study for the School of Anthropology and Museum Ethnography in the 2013 REF.
To understand audience interaction with participatory exhibits, I conducted an ethnography of visitors engaging with At Home in Japan. Some of my initial findings appeared in the Bulletin of the National Museum of Ethnology, Osaka (Daniels 2013), but they were further developed in my monograph What are Exhibitions For? - An Anthropological Approach (Daniels 2019). This book demonstrates how exhibitions function as spaces for social interaction and imaginative play, where anthropological concepts can be enacted and challenged. I argue that framing exhibitions as immersive environments results in more inclusive understandings of cultural knowledge. This model repositions exhibitions as evolving sites of public anthropology.
As part of Disobedient Buildings (AHRC, 2020–2025), I also created my first ethnographic short film, She Waves at Me (Daniels 2022), which bridges anthropology, architecture, and ageing studies. The 20-minute film captures overlooked details of ageing bodies and ageing buildings, showing how older adults navigate neglect and decay while maintaining their homes and lives, while revealing deep entanglements between people, architecture, and care. The film has been widely recognised, screening at academic seminars and conferences across the UK, Germany, Japan, Sweden, Finland, and the US. It was a finalist at the Rotterdam Architecture Film Festival (2023) and Istanbul Architecture and Urban Film Festival (2023), demonstrating its impact beyond anthropology into architecture and urban planning. It has also been used by the charity Age UK in public discussions on wellbeing and health among older urban residents.
Finally, during the Covid-19 pandemic the Disobedient Buildings Team also successfully experimented with innovative methods and new dissemination channels for anthropological knowledge. Between 2021 and 2023 we completed two Disobedient Buildings Podcast series (13 episodes); see https://www.disobedientbuildings.com/podcast). Since October 2024 the Disobedient Buildings Pack Methodology Toolkit that allow researcher to study homes from afar is accessible online at https://www.disobedientbuildings.com/methodology.
Areas of expertise
Economic, Visual, Material Anthropology, Anthropology of Space and Built Environment, Anthropology of Japan (East Asia), Ethnography, Exhibitions.
Teaching
- Option: Objects in Motion – Current Debates in Visual, Material and Economic Anthropology. Website.
- MSc/MPhil Social Anthropology
PROFESSIONAL ACTIVITIES
Editor in Chief TRAJECTORIA: Anthropology, Art and Museums (https://trajectoria.minpaku.ac.jp/index.html)
External examiner
- MA History of Design at the Royal College of Art in London (2013-2015)
- MA in Material and Visual Culture at University College London (2014-2016)
- PhD Dissertations in Social Anthropology at UCL, LSE and SOAS
Pre-publication Reviewer
The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, The Journal of Material Culture, Environment and Planning: Society D, Material Religion, HAU, Journal of Consumer Research, Consumer Culture, Historical Geography, and Human Organisation.
Abby Loebenberg - 'On Thin Ice: Playing dangerously indoors and out in Vancouver' (graduated July 2011)
Abby's thesis explores localised global consumption through ethnographic research about children's television and associated material and spatial practices in Vancouver, Canada. Adult ideas and concerns about danger and the safety of children are contrasted with how children use various elements from television programmes to both understand and negotiate space (public, semi-public and private) and create peer cultures.
Ian Ewart - 'The Anthropology of Engineering: a Cross-cultural Approach' (graduated March 2012)
From a layperson’s point of view, engineering is associated with industrialisation and the scientific method; a streamlined solution-provider, generating the best answer to a practical problem. Non-industrialised cultures that have demonstrated engineering prowess, on the other hand, are seen as having overcome their lack of science and conquered the natural world. Both assumptions will be explored through parallel fieldwork in Borneo and the UK that examines the process of engineering as it actually happens.
Tomohiro Morisawa - 'Objects of Creativity: Ethics and Aesthetics of work in the production of animation movies in Japan' (graduated January 2013)
Tomo's thesis examines ways in which the contrasting discourses of creativity and artisanship articulate the work ethic and aesthetic ideals of animators and other 'creators' involved in the production process of animation movies in Japan. Based on fieldwork at an animation production company, his research will critically engage with emerging anthropological issues of creativity, skill, work, and intellectual property.
Iza Kavedzija - 'Living Well: Changing concepts of the ‘good life’ in Japan through the lens of the ideal home'(graduated February 2013)
Iza's research focuses on ideas of the 'good life' in contemporary Japanese society, particularly as reflected in notions of the ideal home. By looking at how the life choices of the elderly and the young are shaped in relation to decreasingly well defined social roles, it aims to explore the changing realities of constraint and choice under the condition of 'late modernity'.
Andrew Bowsher - Limited Edition: The Consumption of Music Box Sets and the Politics of Distinction (graduated October 2014)
Based on fieldwork in Austin, Texas, Andrew's thesis examines the interplay between consumer cultures and production in the circulation of specialist music products. By focusing on the music box set, a highly prized commodity which appeals to Western collectors of music that exist outside of mainstream popular culture, he questions assumptions in anthropology about subcultural behaviour in popular culture, the interplay between production and consumption of commodities, and the creation and negotiation of value in systems of exchange.
Julien Dugnoille - The Seoul of Cats and Dogs: An Ethnography of animal welfare in contemporary South Korea (graduated April 2015)
In 1988, the South Korean government decided to hide every dog meat restaurant in Seoul in order to avoid potential diplomatic incidents during the Olympics. This marked a turning point in South Koreans’ attitudes towards the consumption of dogs within their own society, oscillating, from then on, between guilt and national identity. While cats and dogs are still consumed as food, they have increasingly become people's pets. Thus, in the last twenty years, animal welfare has become a widely controversial topic. Through an ethnography based inside three animal shelters in Seoul, Julien’s research will unveil South Korean animal welfare’s attitudes in terms of adoption strategies, euthanasia policies, work interactions and ideological conflicts. It engages with wider anthropological issues such as the study of human-animal relationships, ethics, education and nationalism.
Hege H. Leivestad – Ambiguity on Wheels – Caravan Immobilities in Contemporary Europe (graduated November 2015)
Hege H. Leivestad’s work deals with a particular material object: The caravan, and the way social life is constituted in and around it. Based on fieldwork among caravan- and motorhome dwellers in Sweden and Spain she asks what it actually means in 21st century Western Europe to live a life on wheels. In so doing, the thesis ethnographically unpacks the various modalities of dwelling that take place among people for whom the caravan constitutes an extension of an already existing domestic sphere as well as for those where the caravan has become a primary, and often contested, home.
Mary Miller – Drawing things together: an archaeologically-illustrated ethnography of London homes (graduated November 2016)
Mary’s research explores how archaeological practice might benefit the anthropological study of material culture in overcoming the critique that its focus on the social comes at the expense of the material. Through an ethnography that uses both participant observation and archaeological illustration she will examine the interrelationships, movements and changes of objects over time inside three London homes.
Anne-Marie Sim – "What do you want to be when you grow up?" and Other Tales: An Ethnography of Childen in Greater London (graduated January 2017)
This dissertation draws on long term immersive fieldwork in children's worlds, documenting their everyday practices and spontaneous narratives, to explore how children imagine through inter-subjective action in real time potential futures.
Ryotaro Mihara – An ethnography of the Japanese anime industry in India (graduated July 2017)
Although it has long been said that the Japanese domestic anime market is shrinking, anime remains popular overseas (which is often labeled in Japan as "Cool Japan"). One would therefore assume that, in order to survive, players in the Japanese anime industry would expand their business interests and focus their attention abroad. However, this is not happening and through an ethnography of companies that are trying to expand the anime industry in India my research aims to answer this "puzzle".
Maria Salaru - Climate Change | Social Change: An Ethnography of Energy-use in Urban Romania (graduated November 2017)
Through long-term fieldwork in Piatra Neamţ, Romania, Maria’s project explores how urban Romanians negotiate EU policies surrounding climate change. The particular focus is on how EU regulations of home energy saving affect new consumption practices in individual homes, which in turn impact on the local community and the urban landscape. Through this study she hope to reveal the changing understanding of the relationship between the private and public sphere. More specifically, she would like to shed light on the shifting role of the individual within the family, but also in relation to the community, the state and the EU in post-socialist Romania.
Caitlin Meagher - Finding Oneself at Home: Aspiration, consumption, and “the sharehouse lifestyle” in contemporary Japan (graduated March 2018)
The dissertation, based on nineteen months of field research in Osaka prefecture, investigates the recent surge in sharehouses and sharehouse residents in Japan, where living with non-kin others was until recently strongly stigmatized. It explores the marketing rhetoric, the discourses about home-sharing, and the actual practices within the sharehouse where fieldwork was conducted; it asks what it is that this lifestyle promises and the extent to which these promises are delivered on. The focus is on young adults’ changing aspirations in contemporary Japan, the ways they attempt to realize these aspirations through consumption practices, the way the categories of public and private are strategically reconfigured through their uses of material culture, and the tensions that arise when young people undertake a new way of living for which they do not have any existing templates.
Tess Bird - Encouraging Providence: Uncertainty, Wellbeing, and the Making of New American Futures in the Home (graduated April 2018)
Employing both medical and material approaches anthropology, Tess’s research explores the everyday material culture of the urban American home in relation to bodily health and wellbeing. Through fieldwork in a selection of homes in Providence, Rhode Island, she considers materials and techniques that participants drew on in forming both temporary and sustainable wellbeing solutions in the face of everyday disruption. She argues that we must also attend to large-scale disruptions, such as climate change or political-economic turmoil, at the level of the home and immediate community, where the social and material tethers of life are most intimately negotiated. In this way, the American household becomes of fundamental site for understanding how American futures are made.
Julie Valk - Selling Japaneseness: an ethnography of kimono preservation and promotion associations in contemporary Japan (graduated July 2018)
Julie’s research is concerned with the Japanese national costume – the kimono. Julie’s research aims to expand anthropological understandings of the kimono beyond the traditional fields in which the clothing has been studied, such as the clothing’s role within the tea ceremony and the geisha community, through an ethnography of associations seeking to promote the wearing of kimono among women in contemporary Japan. Julie anticipates that her research will shed new light on women’s everyday experience of wearing kimono and reveal how modern women relate to their “traditional” dress. As her research is situated at the intersection between several key themes in anthropology – heritage, gender, material culture and learning – Julie expects that her research will provide a new angle from which to tackle these fundamental questions in anthropology.
Mayanka Mukherji - 'Storeys of Emptiness: An Ethnography of Empty Homes in London' (graduated October 2020)
Based on research in a luxury square and a council estate in Chelsea, London, Mayanka's thesis questioned widespread conceptualisations of empty homes as sites of decay and decline associated with a loss of community. She combined current debates about the transformation of homes into financial assets with the latest material culture approaches to land, belonging and the home, to offer unique insights into everyday experiences of living alongside empty homes. Her research brought attention to land-based practices unfolding at the heart of London - comprising gardening, visiting the nearby cemetery, scattering of ashes, and drawing of family trees - as her participants rooted themselves in place amidst flows of capital and the financialization of housing. By focusing on the practices of care that residents engage in to battle or conceal emptiness across the two sites, Mayanka hopes to reframe empty homes beyond the policy-oriented approach of solving the problem of emptiness, while allowing for a critical interrogation of which homes fall within this problematisation in the first place.
Charlotte Linton - Sustainability reconsidered: An ethnography of natural dyeing in contemporary Japan (graduated in March 2021)
Across twelve months of ethnography Charlotte used design and apprenticeship methodologies by working as a dyer with craftspeople of naturally dyed textiles on the island of Amami Ōshima, southern Japan. Charlotte was able to explore the complex, often contradictory, intertwining of preservation practices, resource extraction, and access to land that define local relationships with the natural environment in Amami, a highly biodiverse island with strong cultural traditions. Her thesis provides unique insight into the manufacture of hand crafted commodities and asks whether sustainability narratives have an impact on everyday lived experienced of producers, venders and consumers of ‘eco-friendly’ textiles, or whether alterative, grassroots approach to ‘sustainability goals’ might have a longer lasting impact on the health of communities socially, economically and environmentally.
Wesam Hassan – Games of Chance in Istanbul: Unpacking the Moral Economy of Luck and Speculation in Times of Crisis (graduated in October 2024)
Wesam thesis, based on 18 months of multimodal ethnography in Istanbul, investigates state-regulated gambling and cryptocurrency trading in Turkey. It explores moral economies of speculative activities against the backdrop of the country's economic crisis. Her research challenges dominant narratives on gambling addiction, advocating for a nuanced understanding that moves beyond simplistic biomedical models. She also considers the socio-political and ethical dimensions of state-regulated speculation, revealing how everyday actions have become inherently speculative in contexts of crisis and demonstrating how speculation has become a pervasive form of relating that influence social relations, economic behaviour, health, and politics.
Monographs
-2019. What are Exhibitions For? - An Anthropological Approach. London: Bloomsbury.
-2010. The Japanese House: Material Culture in the Modern Home. Oxford: Berg Publishers.
> Received the ICAS Book Prize 2013 Reading Committee Accolades / Social Sciences
Refereed Articles
-2024. ‘Even a Piece of Paper has Two Sides’ – Multi-Scalar Cosmologies of Japanese New Year Cards. In The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 30: 646-668.
-2015. Feeling at Home in Contemporary Japan: Space, Atmosphere and Intimacy. In Emotion, Space and Society 15 (2): 47-55.
-2014. Museum Experiments in Living Ethnography: ‘At Home in Japan’ in London? In Bulletin of the National Museum of Ethnology 38 (4): 513-531.
-2012. Beneficial Bonds: Luck and The Lived Experience of Relatedness in Contemporary Japan. In Social Analysis 56 (1):148-64.
-2009. The ‘Social Death’ of Unused Gifts: Loss and value in contemporary Japan. In Journal of Material Culture 14(3): 385-408.
-2008. Japanese Homes Inside Out. In Home Cultures 5(2):115-140.
-2003. Scooping, Raking, Beckoning Luck: Luck, agency and the interdependence of people and things in Japan. In The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 9: 619-638.
-1999. Japanese Material Culture and Consumerism: A review of recent work. In Journal of Material Culture (4): 231-240.
Book Chapters
-[2025]. Pack Methodology – Housing Research in Times of Crisis. In Housing Histories Re-framing Architectural History through Housing. G. Caramellino and F. De Pieri (eds). London: Bloomsbury.
-2023. Two Cups, a Shell and Some Books. Reflections of the Anthropology of Gifting. In Gifts and Books: From Early Myth to the Present. N. Perkins (ed), pp.144-163. Oxford: Bodleian Library.
-2009a. ‘Dolls are Scary’: what constitutes Japanese religious activity?. In Religion and Material Culture: A Matter of Belief. D. Morgan (ed.), pp.153-170. Routledge: London.
-2009b. The Commercial and Domestic Rhythms of Japanese Consumption. In Time, Consumption and Everyday Life: New agendas and directions. Shove, E., Trentmann, F.and R.Wilk (eds.), pp. 262-294. Oxford: Berg.
-2001. The ‘Untidy’ Japanese House. In Home Possessions: Material Culture Behind Closed Doors. D. Miller (ed.), Oxford: Berg.
EXHIBITIONS
2011. Curator of the exhibition ‘At Home in Japan – Beyond the Minimal House’, The Museum of the Home, London, UK
- The exhibition was submitted by The School of Anthropology and Museum Ethnography as one of six impact case studies for the 2014 Research Excellence Framework (REF). Through this immersive exhibition my ethnographic research had a cultural and educational impact on multiple audiences, enhancing their understanding of everyday life inside contemporary urban Japanese homes, and overturning deep-rooted cultural stereotypes that continue to depict Japan as the quintessential, exotic Other. Reviews are available at: http://www.ingedaniels.com/exhibitions.html
2001. Co-curator of the exhibition Souvenirs in Contemporary Japan, The British Museum, London, UK.
- Based on ethnographic research I carried out in Japan between 1996 and 1999, this exhibition explored the scope and variety of souvenirs in domestic travel, their role as gifts and their place in the home.
FILM
2022. She Waves at Me (20 min)
I made this ethnographic film as part of the Disobedient Buildings project, funded by the UK’s Art and Humanities Research Council (2020-2025). The film was select as a finalist for the Rotterdam Architecture Film Festival 2023 and Istanbul Architecture and Urban Film Festival 2023.
PODCAST
2021 Disobedient Buildings Podcast. Series One.
2023 Disobedient Buildings Podcast. Series Two.
I (with two post-doctoral researchers) made two podcast series about housing, health and wellbeing in the UK, Romania and Norway as part of the Disobedient Buildings project, funded by the UK’s Art and Humanities Research Council (2020-2025). This outcome will be part of my impact case study. See: https://www.disobedientbuildings.com/podcast
SELECTED LIST OF INVITED PRESENTATIONS (last 3 years only)
-November 27, 2024. Disobedient Buildings: A Visual Ethnography of European Tower Blocks. Department of Anthropology, Kyoto University, Japan.
-October 28,2024. Disobedient Buildings: Anthropology and Architecture.
Keynote Speaker Lecture Series about Anthropology and Architecture as part of the Montagabendgespräche at the Faculty of Architecture at RWTH Aachen University, Germany (see: https://theorie.arch.rwth-aachen.de/archiv-montagabendgespraeche/).
-November 27, 2023. Ethnographic Film, Housing and Ageing (online). CoE AgeCare Seminar, Department of Social Sciences and Philosophy, University of Jyväskylä, Finland.
-April 27, 2023. Welfare, Wellbeing and Care in European Tower Blocks.
Keynote speaker at the Annual Meeting of the Swedish Anthropological Association (SANT), Stockholm, Sweden. (see:https://www.su.se/socialantropologiska-institutionen/forskning/konferenser-och-seminarier/sant-2023-1.635321).
-March 23, 2023. Disobedient Buildings: Doing Visual Ethnography from Afar (online). Seminar of the Cities Building Culture Project Vilnius, Lithuania.
-March 10, 2023. Aging Bodies and Aging Buildings: Ethnographic film and ageing (online). Rai Film Festival Partnership Event Bristol.
-December 16, 2022. Disobedient Buildings Film ‘She Waves at Me’. Visual Anthropology Lab, National Museum of Ethnology, Osaka, Japan.
-November 10, 2022. Pack Methodology – Studying Homes from Afar (online). Symposium at the Politecnico di Milano, Italy.
